Kevin Bacon, James Purefoy series wraps Season 2

Implausible, irritating, manipulative and downright annoying at times, The Following is the very definition of a guilty pleasure. It’s a serial thriller hardly anyone admits they watch, let alone like, but which racks up sizable numbers in the weekly ratings.

The Following reaches its season’s end Monday with a finale titled Forgive, but don’t think the story will be big on forgiveness. Kevin Bacon’s hard-luck gumshoe Ryan Hardy decides, against his better judgment, to work with his nemesis Joe Carroll (James Purefoy), to help save the woman they both love, but it’s not an agreement that will last. One of The Following’s selling points is the way good does not always triumph over evil. The finale’s details are tightly under wraps. There have been hints in recent episodes, though — the death of a major character one week, the life of another character hanging in the balance the next, this week — that it won’t end well.

James Purefoy in The Following

The Following hails from Kevin Williamson, writer-creator of the Scream movies, and the series shares Scream’s penchant for sudden frights and emotional scares. As a series, it inspires passion and hatred in equal measure. No other TV drama, arguably, so divides its audience.

That’s unlikely to change in the finale. If anything, Williamson will double down on the very qualities some viewers find so annoying and others find endearing, even if they don’t care to admit it.

The Following airs its finale Monday on CTV/Fox

Kevin Bacon, left, with Natalie Zea

Also Watch
The Blacklist is not just a tighter, more disciplined thriller than The Following; it’s arguably the more fun of the two to watch, thanks in no small part to James Spader’s sly performance as hard-to-read criminal mastermind Red Reddington. Linus Roache guest-appears as a political kingmaker in Monday’s episode, set in Prague, in the Czech Republic. (Global/NBC)

National TV columnist for Postmedia News Network.
Two solitudes:
“My dream is to have a bank of TVs where all the different channels are on at the same time and I can be monitoring them,” the social... read more critic Camille Paglia told Wired magazine, back in the day, before Big Brother and before Survivor. “I love the tabloid stuff. The trashier the program is, the more I feel it’s TV.”
And then there’s this, from Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz: “There’s a lot of underlying philosophy to the characters on Gilligan’s Island. They’re really a metaphor for the nations of the world, and their purpose was to show how nations have to get along together . . . or cease to exist.”
There you have it, then. The trashier a program is, the more it’s like TV. Or, if you prefer, TV is a metaphor for the nations of the world, and Gilligan’s Island was really a message about why we don’t all get along.
That’s where I come in.
My first TV memory was of being menaced by a Dalek on Doctor Who — the original, scratchy, black-and-white Who.
My more recent TV memories include the Sopranos finale; 9/11; Elvis Costello’s first appearance (and temporary banishment) on Saturday Night Live; what was really inside the Erlenmeyer flask in The X-Files; Law & Order (the original, and those iconic chimes); glued to the set at 3am local time during the 2003 war in Iraq — TV’s first real-time war —and Bart Simpson scrawling on the chalkboard in The Simpsons’ opening credits: “I Must Not Write All Over the Walls.”
Other Bart-isms, as seen on that TV chalkboard over the years: “I Will Never Win an Emmy,” “I No Longer Want My MTV,” and, pointedly — if a little hopefully — “Network TV is Not Dead.”
I was there to witness "the new dawn of the sitcom" in the mid-1990s, followed — inevitably — by the glut of terrible sitcoms in the early naughts, a glut that led, directly and indirectly, to the rise of reality TV.
There’s been a lot to talk about — good, bad and indifferent — about TV over the years.
That’s where you, and this space, come in. Read on. Enjoy, feel free to agree, disagree and dispute whenever you want. TV may be ugly at times, but it's a mirror of democracy in action. A funhouse mirror at times, a sober reflection at others.View author's profile